ATG Personalized Ecommerce

An Oracle White Paper
March 2011

How to Win Online: Advanced Personalization
in E-Commerce

How to Win Online: Advanced Personalization in E-Commerce

Introduction

E-sellers are facing a stark new reality in today’s online marketplace: You can no longer expect
growth as a result of simply selling online. With the number of net new shoppers online slowing
to a 16 percent annual growth rate 1 after reaching highs of as much as 45 or 50 percent, the
competition for shoppers is heating up. Meanwhile, brand loyalty is sharply decreasing. Given
that shopping online is now a mainstream activity, the challenge is no longer getting new
customers to shop online but rather driving more incremental dollars from the existing base of
online shoppers. The competition to win the customer has never been fiercer. The time has
come to focus “aggressively on e-commerce technology, particularly on multichannel and
personalization technologies.” 2

To fight this battle effectively, e-sellers must give customers reasons to choose them over their
competitors. They must offer customers shopping experiences that are relevant to who they
are and guided by what they need. In short, e-sellers must personalize their customer
interactions. Recent studies show that personalization is a highly effective method for
increasing consumer lifetime value for online sellers. It can have a direct and positive impact
on the core metrics that make up e-commerce success: loyalty, conversion, retention, and
average order size.

1 Forrester Research, “Trends”, 2007.
2 Rob Garf, AMR Research, 2007.

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Getting Personalization Right
Personalization is not just something you sprinkle on top of your Website. It goes far beyond inserting
a customer name at the top of a Web page or e-mail. Personalization is a business strategy—one that
takes into account not only who the customer is but what she likes, what she doesn’t like, when she
wants to hear from you, and when she doesn’t. To be most effective, personalization is ideally managed
from a single integrated platform that makes it easy for you to deliver a relevant experience across all
customer interactions. It starts with knowing who the customer is and then guiding her down the right
path, using a range of approaches that ultimately result in purchase and loyalty.
Although personalization has typically been equated with a recommendation engine for more-relevant
product offers, Oracle views personalization more broadly—as delivering the right content to the right
person at the right time, across interactions, throughout the full customer lifecycle. Sometimes,
e-sellers can get overwhelmed at the mere thought of trying to create a personalized experience for
each customer. But personalization doesn’t require you to create an individual plan for each customer.
It’s about implementing a plan that feels personal to your customers. When executed properly,
personalization enables you to extend your existing customer segmentation strategy to the online
arena—and even enhance it—by using additional knowledge acquired from your customers’ online
behaviors. The result is a customer experience—integrated across the Web, e-mail, and contact
center—that feels customized for the individual but is actually automatically driven.

Personalization and the Long Tail
Understanding what personalization has to offer your business, and how and when to implement it, is
key to taking advantage of the opportunity that lies in the “Long Tail,” a concept that the industry is
recognizing as a growing e-commerce opportunity. A term first coined by Wired magazine Editor-in-
Chief Chris Anderson, the Long Tail refers to the theory that products in low demand or with low
sales volume can collectively make up a huge market whose size rivals or exceeds that of the best
sellers. Consider that Forrester Research estimates that there are now some 650,000 sole
proprietorships with e-commerce Websites that collectively sell roughly US$13 billion in merchandise
annually. These small e-commerce sites drive an astounding one-quarter of online retail revenues.

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Figure 1. The Long Tail refers to the theory that products in low demand or with low sales volume can collectively rival
or exceed the market share of best sellers.

Clearly e-sellers who are putting the Long Tail theory into practice are harnessing the distribution
power of the internet and effectively reaching the mass of niches. Meanwhile, larger companies are also
taking advantage. For example, while you’ll have a hard time finding any independent films at your
local Blockbuster, you can turn to Netflix to find nine subgenres of independent films. Similarly,
although you won’t find a single wedding dress in your local J. Crew store, you have a wide array to
choose from on the J. Crew Wedding and Parties shop on jcrew.com.
It’s clear that the Long Tail offers real upside for consumers and e-sellers alike. Yet there is a downside
as well: when consumers face too many choices, they may become overwhelmed and unable to decide
what to buy. They may freeze, and abandon the site. To make huge inventories less daunting but still
compelling, e-sellers need to narrow the offers they present—not to the generic best sellers but rather
to the most-relevant choices for the particular consumer. That is “personalization” in practice. It is the
secret to taking advantage of the Long Tail.
Whether a site has hundreds or tens of thousands of products to offer, how does the merchandiser
make the right compelling offer at the right time? How does the consumer quickly navigate to the
product she most wants? To achieve both the merchandiser’s and the consumer’s goals and still take
advantage of the Long Tail, retailers are going to have to get much more sophisticated about how they
use their Website platforms. They must use every bit of knowledge they can glean about each customer
to guide him or her to the products that the consumer wants to buy—and that the merchandiser most
wants to sell.

Personalization in Practice
In November 2006, Forrester Research revealed: “Nearly half of consumers who visit a landing page
leave in under eight seconds. To build relevance, brands must start with segmentation models that
enable personalization and deliver targeted function, content, and images.”

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The Starting Point: Know Your Segments and Create Personas
Personalization begins with the basic best practice of defining the rules by which you interact with your
customers. The key to creating effective personalization rules is leveraging what you know about your
customers based on past and current interactions and using profile management to store key customer
attributes. These attributes combine to create customer segments or personas that enable you to drive
relevant interactions.
Personas offer a way of enhancing your traditional customer segments with subjective information that
personifies that segment (for example, gardeners who live on the east coast of North America, or
fashion-loving twenty-somethings who go for top brands). Like segments, personas are informed by
customers’ demographics, psychographics, purchase patterns, the channel they use, as well as the value
associated with their importance to your business. Personas start with understanding customer
profiles—what you know about an individual based on both offline and online interactions (such as
gender, age, and geography). As you extend the customer profile by adding enhanced information
based on a customer’s actions (such as buying history, click behavior, search terms, and shopping cart
contents) over time, you can group similar profiles into personas, and tailor interactions to make the
shopping experience even more relevant.

Anonymous Personalization: An Oxymoron?
Using personas to drive personalization doesn’t require you to get every customer to log in and fill out
a profile. The information you need to create your personas can be gleaned even without the
customer’s active participation, and without your knowing who the customer is. For instance, your
Website lets you learn about your visitor—even if she remains anonymous—by seeing what types of
products she browses, what articles she reads, what searches she runs, or what questions she asks on
the self-service site. With this information, your Website content can be dynamically tailored for your
visitor in an instant, as soon as the visitor is associated with a persona.
For example, let’s say you’re selling sporting goods. You have a promotion about running shoes on
your home page. An anonymous user comes to the site, ignores the running shoes, and starts looking
at mountain bikes. When he comes back to the home page, it would automatically and dynamically
switch out the running shoe ad, replacing it with an ad about biking equipment and accessories. Show
him something more relevant to his needs, and he is more likely to buy. That is anonymous yet
effective personalization.
These days, many consumers are also more willing to share information or answer a few questions as
they shop—as long as they believe the information they provide will improve the recommendation
they receive in return. For example, a running-shoe store may prompt a shopper for her arch type,
running style, body frame, and brand preference before making a personalized recommendation.

Personalization Informed by Customer History and Past Behavior
Of course, the more you know about the customer, the more relevance you can infuse into your
interactions. Building on the sporting goods example above, now let’s say you can identify the shopper.
Your site should have access to her buying history so that you know what products she already owns as

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well as which ones have interested her historically. When she puts a pair of running pants in her
shopping cart, you will want to make her a cross-sell offer. But rather than offer her the same jacket
she just bought last week, you’ll offer her a different accessory. That’s history-based personalization.

Personalization That Selectively Offers a Live Interaction
Monitoring your customers’ actions in real time can bring personalization to the truly intimate level.
Now you can personalize not only the content you display to your customers but also the type of
service you offer, either across your whole site or just on sections that customers tend to abandon or
find tricky to navigate.
Let’s say your shopper puts a big-ticket item in her cart, such as a plasma TV or a US$1,000 handbag.
But then the shopper hesitates; rather than checking out, she begins to look at the shipping
information page. You don’t want to lose her purchase. The new trend here is proactive click-to-call, a
capability that lets you pop up a window and offer live help with a message that says, “If you have a
question about shipping, click here to speak with a representative.” Once the shopper clicks, she goes
to the top of the agent queue, and her phone rings instantly, connecting her to a customer service
agent who completes the sale.
Click-to-call is probably not a worthwhile tactic for saving the sale of a US$10 CD, but for a US$3,000
TV, it’s absolutely worthwhile. In some markets, click-to-chat can work equally well, proactively
offering the prospect an instant live chat session with a customer service agent. Oracle’s experience in
deploying this technology shows that this kind of service can increase conversion rates by as much as
50 percent.
For the best results, you can extend cross-sell personalization to the call center. When a customer
connects to the call center for that US$1,000 handbag, you want the agent to have access to the same
history-driven, cross-sell offer that would be presented on the Website—the shoes, in the right size,
that go with the handbag. You want to drive the call center with tools that increase order size, not just
reduce costs. That is the epitome of effective, cross-channel offer management.

Multistage, Scenario-Based Personalization
The stark reality of today’s marketplace, with all of the options customers have before them, is that a
single instance of a relevant interaction rarely evolves into a lasting relationship. The good news is that
with segments or personas in place, personalization can help drive and track the full purchase cycle.
As an e-seller, you can drive even more relevance into your customer relationships by introducing
multistage, scenario-based personalization. A scenario is a way of taking a rich set of customer
interactions and facilitating them across marketing, selling, and service encounters. The sequence of
events that make up a scenario is designed to lead the customer along the path toward achieving the
specific business goal that you define. These different events, or stages, can be triggered by or timed to
correspond with the actions that each customer takes. A scenario can last a few moments or extend
over weeks or months; it can be relatively simple or have many paths. Using scenarios, you can engage,
track, and communicate with the customer throughout his purchase decision process. As he potentially

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moves away from your site to look at competitors, a well-timed, relevant interaction driven by
scenarios can give that customer a reason to come back to your site.
For scenarios to work well, you first need to determine precise business goals for your particular
segments or personas. Are you looking to close the first sale? Increase purchase frequency? Increase
the average order amount? With target goals defined, you can begin designing multistage scenarios that
correspond to the behaviors of your customers and prospects. This kind of personalization introduces
a series of preset responses that correlate to customers’ actions. For example, if a customer visits your
Website and asks to be notified of your holiday special but then does not respond when he receives
that e-mail, the next step is automatically triggered. That step may be a reminder phone call from a
sales person. If, after a week passes, the prospect still does not respond, a second communication
could be initiated: this time, perhaps an e-mail with an even better offer.
Multistage, scenario-based personalization doesn’t focus on a single transaction but rather a series of
interactions that ultimately lead to the desired outcome. By introducing triggers at critical interaction
points that take your customer into account, you can help lead that customer down the optimal path.
With multistage personalization, you are monitoring and responding to events as they happen and
reaching out to the customer to start a meaningful and relevant dialogue. The best multistage scenarios
span across channels. Some customer interactions will trigger an e-mail response, while others may
activate a customer service call. Still others may prompt a sales call. Some of these communications will
call for immediate customer action, while others lay the groundwork for future interactions.

Searchandising and Automated Personalization
Connecting customers quickly and easily with the products they seek is at the heart of personalization.
Searchandising and automated personalization are two new advanced personalization techniques now
coming of age and bringing with them the power to truly guide prospects down the desired path.

Searchandising

The principle of searchandising is simple: The consumer is looking to find an item. The merchandiser is
looking to sell an item. These two goals were once totally independent of each other on the Web. Yet
they should be two sides of the same coin—in fact, two uses of the same technology. That’s
searchandising. Leveraging the Long Tail requires it.
Take a basic shoe-shopping experience, for example. Say the shopper searches for shoes, and you carry
1,000 different styles. You need to be able to determine what shoes you should present, in what order,
and with what information. Should you present practical or Prada? Making that determination starts
with a logical first step of recalling the customer’s purchase history, profile, and segment, and then
presenting the shoes most in line with those criteria. Taking it a step further, your presentation should
match your merchandising strategy. Perhaps you have a particular vendor relationship that favors one
brand over another, or a particular shoe on special, or knowledge that a particular shoe sells best within
a specific segment. The merchandiser ought to be able to specify, as part of the catalog data, which
shoes should appear first in a search. In essence, you want to be able to present all of this in the
context of the multiple facets of a shoe (such as color, style, brand, size, and cost) so that consumers

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can opt to see—or you can opt to present—only shoes in a certain price range, by a popular designer,
or in the customer’s size. All of this is searchandising—allowing the merchandiser to drive how search
results are presented. Moreover, personalized searchandising drives search results not only by
merchandising strategy but also by purchase history, profile, and segment of the prospective
customer—ultimately serving to increase basket size and conversion rates.

Automated Personalization

Automated personalization is also a way to keep your customer interactions highly relevant. You are
probably familiar with recommendation engines (sometimes called collaborative filtering). A number of
online megastores are famous for this technique—“people who bought this item also bought these
items.” Where do those recommendations come from? A common frustration with some of these
engines results from purchases made as gifts. If you buy a children’s book for your nephew’s birthday,
you may receive offers for similar products from then on.
A better approach is one based on advanced personalization. Like search, recommendations ought to
be personalized and driven by your merchandising strategy. The most sophisticated approach to
personalized selling automates recommendations more intelligently—according to both the purchases
made and the segment or persona the shopper belongs to. Automated personalization modifies
recommendations according to other information you have about the shopper, rather than assigning
customers to segments based solely on their most-recent purchases. For example, a New England
gardener should always receive recommendations for hardy plants, even if he bought plants on one
occasion for his uncle in Palm Springs. At the same time, if the merchandiser is pushing roses instead
of marigolds, the customer should get that recommendation. Recommendation engines built into the e-
commerce platform—and integrated with the catalog, profiles, purchase history, search, and
merchandising—will lead to true competitive advantage.

Conclusion
According to the Patricia Seybold Group, success will go to companies that deliver rich and
personalized cross-channel, cross-lifecycle experiences to their customers. Customers clearly want a
more relevant, better-integrated experience as they traverse the touchpoints of Web, e-mail, contact
centers, and face-to-face stores, whether receiving marketing information, completing a transaction, or
seeking post-sale service. They want companies to understand their buying and service history, as well
as their preferences. They want to receive the right information at the right time, relevant to their needs
and informed by the context of their current situation.
It’s time for e-sellers to wake up to this new reality. Despite the fact that just 16 percent of online
shoppers represent “new” customers to the Web, e-sellers are still dedicating more than half of their

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interactive marketing resources towards new-customer acquisition. 3 It’s time for retailers to focus less
on acquiring net new online customers and instead on delivering the best possible customer experience
for the millions of customers already relying on the online marketplace to meet their shopping needs.
Oracle recognizes that personalizing the customer experience is one of your best opportunities for
attracting, retaining, and building loyalty with your customers, which ultimately leads to a competitive
advantage. Oracle also recognizes that successfully creating that experience requires a scalable,
adaptable, and automated approach that places control in the hands of business users. This
understanding has influenced the development of Oracle’s entire e-commerce suite. Oracle offers the
industry’s only platform for cross-channel personalization across the customer lifecycle. Giving Oracle
customers a single tracking point for demographics, behaviors, purchases, responses, and interactions
enables them to create dynamic, highly personalized interactions with their customers. Oracle
solutions, which are used by hundreds of the best-known e-sellers worldwide, deliver highly relevant,
personal experiences that lead to ongoing, profitable customer relationships.

3 Forrester Research, “Trends”, 2007.

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How to Win Online: Advanced Personalization Copyright © 2007, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is provided for information purposes only and
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